Those of you who are not long time Mac users may not even remember Claris. Claris was a wholly owned Apple subsidiary that produced some of the most killer software of its day. Most of Claris software offerings still live on today. Filemaker, for instance, is still around. Parts of Claris Emailer got worked into Mail.app (although my friend Dawn would argue, not enough of it). Claris Organizer was sold to Palm Inc. and became Palm Desktop for the Mac (and remains to this day largely identical to the Claris version). ClarisWorks eventually became AppleWorks.
In my opinion, ClarisWorks is one of the best office suites ever conceived. It was the most used application on my Mac for several years. It was way ahead of it’s time and even Microsoft Office took years to even catch up with it’s features on the Mac. Therefore, it was with great interest and excitement that I stumbled across this history of ClarisWorks that ends up, in part, being a history of Claris the company: